14. 个 (ge): (“default” measure word) [For people]; (noun) size; (adjective) individual [Measure words are really important in Chinese, but they take some time to get used to. As my professor used to say, “Better use the default measure word than no measure word at all”.]

15. 我 (wǒ): I; me; self

Some tips on writing 这 and 我:

For 这, the most important stroke is the long nà stroke at the bottom. The horizontal strokes are parallel with each other and the left dot is a bit lower than the right dot. Here is an excerpt of the book that I wrote about.

Like he says, it’s a hard stroke, especially the second stroke, which should be softly curved. I’ve found that’s the hardest part for me, keeping that soft curve (so please follow the official writing and not mine).

For 我, the horizontal stroke and the right gōu stroke (right hook) are the most important. Notice the horizontal stroke is slightly tilted upwards and the right hook comes almost from the top. You want to get this character right because you’re going to write it quite a bit and after a while you want to just be able to write it in script and not 7 separate strokes. It’s actually one of those first characters that will easily flow into script when you write it fast.

Look, here is a hand-written note with 我 and 的, can you find the two “我”s and the “的”?

Hover over image to see Chinese text.

Since we now have more characters we can write more and longer phrases. I’ve included a sheet of some of those phrases. Remember to practice, about 100 times per character and more for characters that give you trouble. Also, practice just writing them from memory and not with a reference, you can cover the previously written ones.